S.C. emergency personnel train for mass natural disasters at Columbia Metro Airport (+ video)

As a C-17 cargo plane flew into the Columbia Metropolitan Airport, local, state and federal emergency personnel prepared to unload its cargo of survivors and victims from a massive Category 5 hurricane that hit the East Coast.

Well, almost. Although the emergency personnel were real, the victims were volunteers from the Civil Air Patrol, and the hurricane was only imaginary. It was all part of a large-scale demonstration and training exercise conducted by the Midlands Incident Management Team and the South Carolina Forestry Commission to prepare for when the real thing happens.

In all, 190 personnel from 33 organizations gathered at the airport Wednesday morning to carry out the annual exercise, which is held in Greenville and Columbia in alternate years.

“We get to do what we have trained and prepared to do,” Incident Commander Mike Edmonds said. “What better way to hone your skill? This is a full-scale exercise, and we are going to make ourselves better under non-emergency conditions.”

Edmonds, who is also the assistant chief of the Columbia Fire Department, said although the demonstration took a couple of weeks to organize, it would only take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours to mobilize the disaster relief task force and have them prepped and ready to receive patients from a disaster.

“In a real world scenario, we may be catching planes and receiving planes perpetually, so we need to set up a system that can withstand and sustain that,” Edmonds said.

The volunteer patients represented patients that would have been staying in hospitals on the East Coast that sustained damage during a hurricane and needed to be transported to other area hospitals to receive treatment. Once unloaded from the cargo plane, the “patients” were admitted into a triage station set up in one of the airport’s hangars and evaluated. They then were transported via helicopter or ambulance to local hospitals to receive continued treatment.

“(We) want for people to know that there are a lot experts that get together to fine tune this like a machine,” Maj. Jeffrey Jackson of the S.C. State Guard said. “We rehearse this every year, and there are people that specialize in this type of scenario.”

Special Operations Chief James Krusen said the need for this training has become even more prevalent since the calamity of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.

“It’s definitely shown the need to be prepared,” Krusen said. “I definitely think that our state has gotten out in front of that and has done a lot of evacuation practice every year.”

This story was originally published May 13, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "S.C. emergency personnel train for mass natural disasters at Columbia Metro Airport (+ video)."